Marijke van Warmerdam

“An eye – that’s where it all starts. Shrewdly gazing from between almost archeological wrinkles. It’s old. An elephant’s eye. An eye that’s been through the war. The war of 218 B.C., that is – Hannibal against the Romans. And this eye remembers even more: it has a memory of mammoths, of monuments like the Tyrannosaurus Rex. How would an eye like that see the world today? As a place where everything has only gotten more shriveled as the ages pass?” (From: C. Bierens (ed.), Sonsbeek 2008 Grandeur, Thieme Art b.v., 2008, p. 23) Using a stationary camera and employing looping, repetition and silence, Marijke van Warmerdam evokes a meditative stillness in her videos that shuns any sense of measured time in favour of foregrounding the process of repetition itself. Het grote geheugen (The Great Memory, 2008) focuses on the eyelid of an elephant; as the eye blinks and shifts, we are induced to contemplate the nature of consciousness. The artists recent inkjet prints on canvas with painted additions invariably take nature as their subject: Blossom in the Air (2010) has a lightness of touch, with pale splashes of pink applied to a blossoming branch and a cirrus clouded sky. By focusing on the minutiae of the external world, van Warmerdam addresses the big questions of whether subjectivity is the defining characteristic of human nature. (Frieze Art Fair Yearbook, 2010)